Breathless for solo exploration

Nomadic Preface

Nomadic is a tragic solo tabletop role-playing game focused on exploration and survival. In this game, you play as a pilot exploring the depths of the universe in search of humanity’s new home after the Primordials retook Earth. Inspired by No Man’s Sky and the eponymous song by Ben Prunty, this game is simultaneously harsh, hopeless, and beautiful.

Nomadic was the first time I felt comfortable enough with the Breathless engine make major changes to it in the hope of fitting a drastically different type of game.

Mechanically, this game diverges from Breathless in the following ways:

• There are two oracles used by the player throughout the game. The question oracle is used to answer questions about the world where the player character may not be involved. The risk oracle is used to answer whether the player should or should not perform a check as they attempt to do something risky in the fiction.
• Instead of a single stress track, there are four (body, mind, gear, ship) and the game tells you exactly when and how many boxes should be marked. On top of this, each resource track is linked to a table full of possible complications.
• There’s a strong gameplay loop that forces the solo player to go through the same steps over and over again, guiding them both mechanically and in the narrative.
• There’s an event that gets triggered when all four resource tracks are filled, which offers a choice to the player and prompts them to choose whether they want to abandon the game or continue.

Website: https://nomadic.farirpgs.com/